I finally decided to see what all the hype was about. Many of you know i like Ubuntu for its simplicity and straight-forwardness, as well as packages that are fairly recent. I installed the latest Mint Celena Beta 3 and it takes that simplicity and recentness to the next level.

Recentness: The included Pidgin is 2.1.1 and Firefox is 2.0.o.6 (compared to 2.0 and 2.0.0.4 in ubuntu, respectively). Several other packages have also been updated to more recent versions. Package choice is also slightly different. For instance instead of Rhythmbox, mint uses Amorok. Other packges included in Mint that are not part of ubuntu are : tomboy and sunbird (and a few text-mode apps).

Simplicity: Ubuntu has always been simple but mint takes it a step further. For starters it already comes pre-loaded with java 1.6, Flash 9, and a boat-load of various media codecs. Furthermore it includes Envy, a tool that makes installation of proprietary nvidia and ati drivers as simple as 2 mouse clicks and it works extremely well. It also has a first-run wizard which helps you enable/disable some things such as the possiblity to do kernel updates (which they recommend you disable for stability purposes).

Artwork: If you are tiered of the "Human" orange-brown theme then Mint might have the solution, its a black-green-white theme that is actually very appealing. see screenshots (on their site) for details. Grub is also fancier (ala Suse style) which gives it a nice first impression.

Note that Mint's mirrors are slower than ubuntu so downloading the iso and mint-specific packages of their repo will be slower than ubuntu. No, apt-get upgrades don't take forever since mint basically uses the stock feisty sources.list save a few modifications.

overall rating:

cons: as with traditional ubuntu its still a bit on the slow side, though i've noticed under gnome it takes up about 30 or 40mb less to idle which is fairly nice. boot times aren't the greatest either unfortunately. the GTK Xorg config tool is a complete fail, and their "recommended" settings for the first time wizard fail too.

Hmm have to try this distro out also. Seems interesting. The only problem i have with Linux is that it is a pain in the ...... to make the Wireless work.

I must say i never really felt that way.. wireless has always worked really well for me. Maybe its because i have an Atheros card and most distros now include Madwifi by default, or maybe you are just screwing something up. Ndiswrapper works reasonably well for me too on my other lappy which happens to have a weired wireless chipset.

I have the intel/pro wireless 3945 chip and i was encountering a little problems. Nothing really bad though.

wireless was an absolute breeze with both K/Ubuntu and Sabayon, and the Sabayon was truly impressive since it was the broadcom BCM4318 PCI card others have had trouble getting to work, and it worked - literally out of the box, even WPA worked on the first try with the supplied GUI tool. YMMV of course depending on your adapter and distro, but my experience recently has been very positive.

Edit: and I also have the Intel 3945 adapter. works great with Ubuntu.

Wireless is VASTLY improved rom where it used to be, and I beleive there is a push to get more structure into it in the kernel, but it still isn't perfect.

Seablade

well i wouldn't call it the "other ubuntu"
it is based off of ubuntu, but with every new release, it's becoming it's own distro. we don't call ubuntu the "other debian" because it has changed so much even though they are very similar. same with mint

personally, i dont like the standard mint desktop, icons and pretty much its entire design lol. but luckily, gnome is very easy to customize and it does save me some time by adding all those other things such as codecs and flash.


the new mint release should be killer (the one that will be based off gusty)
im still sticking with ubuntu only because i like to do it myself and i feel like insta

Hmm I ponder... does this mean a return of the ABF trying out new distros every week?

Seablade

not likely.... i am too busy with school/work to do that right now. when i have time (perhaps winter break) i will attempt gentoo again, or just setup arch the way i want... i wanted to install arch but it kept giving me issues that i had no time to resolve this weekend and i need a working computer. that is why i installed mint... i lost my ubuntu install cd anyway so thought i'd try something else but still ubuntu b/c i know it works on my hardware.

Heh know the feeling about being to busy lately believe me. I gotta finish up my prelim mixes on a CD by tomorrow to give first runs to the Producer and Director, so that will take me many hours of making lots of noise on little sleep. Unfortunately that is only one of 4 jobs I am doing at the moment on top of my school work, so yea... It is pretty busy around here. Haven't been able to do much of anything that i wanted to lately.

Seablade

Looked at it a little last night going to give it a try see how it works.

err....kinda wanna retract my previous answer. just found FaunOS... basically a ready to go configuration of ARCH. Looks good, includes everything that I need and not (a lot of) what i don't. Little disappointed its KDE...would have liked gnome or better yet fluxbox but i can live with kde... gives me an excuse to install ARCH next weekend in 10 minutes vs a good 5 hrs it'd take to get fully going from scratch .. still faster than gentoo (b/c its binary) but its 5 hrs i dont have.